1 online resource (xiv, 242 pages) :

Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, inter-disciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners. This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences - biological, mineral, social or spiritual - of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them

Print version record

Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction : Considering the inedible, consuming the ineffable / Jeremy MacClancy, Helen Macbeth and Jeya Henry -- Evidence for the consumption of the inedible : who, what, when, where and why? / Sera L. Young -- Consuming the inedible : pica behaviour / Carmen Strungaru -- The concepts of food and non-food : perspectives from Spain / Isabel González Turmo -- Food definitions and boundaries : eating constraints and human identities / Ellen Messer -- A vile habit? the potential biological consequences of geophagia, with special attention to iron / Sera L. Young

The discovery of human zinc deficiency : a reflective journey back in time / Ananda S. Prasad -- Geophagia and human nutrition / Peter Hooda and Jeya Henry -- Consumption of materials with low nutritional value and bioactive properties : non-human primates vs. humans / Sabrina Krief -- Lime as the key element : a 'non-food' in food for subsistence / Ricardo Ávila, Martín Tena and Peter Hubbard -- Salt as a 'non-food': to what extent do gustatory perceptions determine non-food vs. food choices? / Claude Marcel Hladik

Non-food food during famine : the Athens famine survivor project / Antonia-Leda Matalas and Louis E. Grivetti -- Eating garbage : socially marginal food provisioning practices / Rachel Black -- Eating cat in the north of Spain in the early twentieth century / F. Xavier Medina -- Insects : forgotten and rediscovered as food. Entomophagy among the Eipo, highlands of West New Guinea, and in other traditional societies / Wulf Schiefenhövel and Paul Blum

Eating snot : socially unacceptable but common. Why? / María Jesús Portalatín -- Cannibalism : no myth, but why so rare? / Helen Macbeth, Wulf Schiefenhövel, and Paul Collinson -- From edible to inedible : social construction, family socialisation, and upbringing / Luis Cantarero -- The use of waste products in the fermentation of alcoholic beverages / Rodolfo Fernández and Daria Deraga -- Afterword : Earthy realism : geophagia in literature and art / Jeremy MacClancy

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